Just one picture? I was looking forward to more of the parade.

Isn’t there a word for drawing voting districts to elect a certain type of person?
Gerry…something

SPS intentionally doesn't ask the questions because they know the answers...and the answers don't ideologically fit. People can see the collapse in educational quality, especially gifted kids, and are walking away as fast as they can. Once they formally kill the HC program by "bringing it back to the local schools" while "there will be no special curriculum for HC/AL students" (actual text from our school's principal) the vanishing act will get worse. The school now has 500 kids, half-time art, half-time music, half-time librarian, half-time AP, and a student/teacher ratio of 24/1 or worse, depending on grade. Kids spend over an hour a day unsupervised on iPads to free up the teacher to do things. This year the bleed to HC/Private is 20% going into next year, and that's an off-cycle year. Hate to see K to 1.

And yes, before you say "buh, buh....buh Equity!!!!", there is exactly no one equitizing the folks at Lakeside Acadamy, or Overlake, etc... Middle-class parents are trying to give their kids a shot at competing with those kids in life. SPS views middle-class kids as state funding checks to be equitized, and if those kids get less, even better, it is also equity.

Needless to say, we bailed. If you can't beat 'em (private school families), join 'em. And thus another state check vanishes, and the budget gap gets worse. And the downward spiral continues. Eventually, engaged parents without the means to escape start demanding charter schools to avoid the worst issues with SPS. At this point, short of a total realignment of priorities and cleaning house of all the worthless educrats at HQ, SPS is headed to the lovely state of other major city programs like DCPS, a parking lot of the families that can't escape.

@4
Huzzah!

Aramis dear, My neighbor has two sons who went all through Seattle Public Schools. The older one (Garfield) got his degree from UW in three years and is starting grad school in the fall. His best friend (also Garfield) got his degree from NYU. The younger one (Franklin) just finished his freshman year at WWU.

In fact, now that I think of it, all of my friends and co-workers who had kids in the Seattle Public Schools have done well academically in their college years, but the schools are only as good as the parents.

@6 Catalina, dear, things have changed a LOT since the kids who are now in college went there. Hell, things have changed a LOT in the six years since we reviewed the school while looking for neighborhoods moving out here and now. Try a wayback machine for the school websites circa 2017 and today, you'll see the scrub on gifted and talented programs. Kids today will not be getting the education kids of even 5 years ago got.

If you want good schools, you have to spend money on them. If you insist on starving your schools' budget, you're going to get shitty results.

Quit being such a Scrooge about it. It's for the kids.

@9 WA spends the 7th most per pupil in the country and has the 5th highest average teacher salary. The amount of money dedicated to education is more than half the state budget. Pouring more money into a system that is not working will not fix it. When McCleary was passed a majority of the money was funneled into teacher salaries. That is great for teachers but doesn't necessarily translate to better education outcomes. The second issue is the state allocates funding on a per pupil basis so as student populations decline district funding is reduced which makes the problem worse (especially for districts like Seattle which signed a massive union contract last year that they already knew they couldn't afford).

Schools today aren't set up to focus on educational outcomes, they are too worried about solving societal issues and dealing with a lot of the social issues kids are dealing with post Covid. There was just an op ed in the Times last month from a parent who opined parents should send their kids to school based on social justice goals rather than strive for the best education. That's idealistic and naive but it represents a lot of the thinking in our schools today.

@10: I don’t know where you obtained those statistics, but Washington State is not in the top ten states in spending per pupil:

“The ten states with the highest per pupil spending are: New York ($24,040), District of Columbia ($22,759), Connecticut ($20,635), New Jersey ($20,021), Vermont ($19,400), Alaska ($17,726), Massachusetts ($17,058), New Hampshire ($16,893), Pennsylvania ($16,395), and Wyoming ($16,224).”

(https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state)

If DC is not considered a state, then Washington is 17th; otherwise, it ranks at #18 on that list.

(I’m not arguing that Washington’s performance is unacceptable, especially to Seattle and Bellevue, which send so much money to Olympia.)

More on that Pride bruhaha in Franklin, Tennessee – a very conservative Christian, affluent, very Republican small town that’s more or less a white people’s retreat from Nashville. Really. It’s still very much Buford Beauregard Whatever.

The mayor, who in some newspaper accounts comes off as a voice-of-reason overriding the religious zealots who wanted to ditch Pride in Franklin (The children! The children! And those satanic drag shows!), was not a brave politician. He limited activity to private land, he insisted the Pride committee have no drag shows, and he warned the committee the smallest infraction would result in the yanking of the permit and his guarantee that Franklin would never have another Pride event.

So this morning I’m thinking about the whole reason why we commemorate that ruckus up in Greenwich Village back in 1969 – the summer of Stonewall and Woodstock. The drag community had had it with random police harassment, with “wipe that shit off your face,” with “take off that wig and dress, queer.” This was happening in our own ratty, little spaces, mostly Mafia-owned, even after payoffs to the police. Here they’d come with their clubs and their whistles and their handcuffs, until someone, then many said, “Uh-uh, no. We aren’t gonna take this shit anymore!”

This is what I find sad and troubling about Pride in Franklin: We had to ask permission and approval to celebrate ourselves. We allowed someone to shake a finger in our face telling us how much and how many along with unreasonable conditions and unveiled threats – a modest chocolate sundae with some pages of The Bible wadded up in it. Those gurls at Stonewall would not be proud. Fuck that mayor. Fuck Franklin, Tennessee.

Next year, I hope the planners plan something enormous that brothers and sisters nationwide will attend. A gay Woodstock. Tell them in Franklin. Tell them everywhere, “No, baby. Them daze is ovah! And we ain’t puttin’ up with that shit ever again.”

@11 I went back to find that stat and it looks like I misread it but the data you cited is not right either. Based on the state fiscal report we are 15th @ 16.7K per student (pg 35)

https://leg.wa.gov/Senate/Committees/WM/Documents/Citizen%27s%20guides/K12%20Booklet_2022.pdf

That data is from 2019-20 and does take into account the last big jump in prop tax in 2021. What is super crazy though is you can see the spike from McCleary in 2019 in the chart on pg 30 and the fact we have been investing more in eduction than the CPI since 2014. Funding isn't the issue here.

@13 - a big reason that we spend more than most states on schools, and a lot of that goes to teachers' salaries, is that the cost of living in much of this state is way higher than average and we would like our teachers to not regale their students with tales of the Fancy Feast they had for dinner last night.

@19 I'm not arguing that I'm just noting that the idea that the issue with education in WA state is primarily tied to funding is not accurate. We could jump to #1 in funding and the outcomes won't really change because most of it will go to administrative costs.

The American public school system provided the backbone of the best educational system on the planet for well over a century (or second best based on this article, though there's obviously a shit-ton of noise that goes into any of these ranking systems https://www.upgradabroad.com/articles/best-education-system-in-the-world/.)

That system obviously and expectedly struggled to keep up with the demands and precautionary actions necessitated by a deadly and easily transmissible virus that's killed 7 million people and counting, but it'd be insane to just abandon the institution based on these struggles.

Christ. Just admit when you’re wrong, you asshole.

@12: “He limited activity to private land,”

The Pride event in Franklin was held in a public park. The Mayor’s tie-breaking vote to grant a permit kept it on public property. From the New York Times:

“…Moms for Liberty, founded in early 2021 to protest pandemic-era restrictions in schools, demanded that city leaders deny the event's permit to force it to private property…”

(“After Backlash, a Tennessee Pride Festival Has a Different Feel:” 25 June 2023: A.14.)

Franklin first held a Pride event two years ago; the place is hardly San Francisco.

‘Next year, I hope the planners plan something enormous that brothers and sisters nationwide will attend. A gay Woodstock. Tell them in Franklin. Tell them everywhere, “No, baby. Them daze is ovah! And we ain’t puttin’ up with that shit ever again.”‘

So, fighting for safety and respect in the streets because corrupt NYPD cops won’t stay bought has become, “let’s go far, far out of our way, to a place we’d never go otherwise, to annoy some locals”? That sounds like a lot of work, just to appear really petty and mean-spirited. Bigots have a right to preach their hateful bible; do you want them making a special trip to your block to do it?

@25 - "Bigots have a right to preach their hateful bible; do you want them making a special trip to your block to do it?"

No, I wouldn't want it, but I know that my personal beliefs shouldn't be used to block it. I stand corrected about private land, but the celebration was limited to that area only, and I believe there was a six-hour time limit - a ruling loaded with prejudice and loathing.

What would I do if the Evangelicals were coming to the 'hood for a Big Hootenanny? Why...I'd pack up the car and be gone for the weekend.

@15 That's a perfectly cromulent word.

@13: Our two sets of figures do not contradict, because they describe different years. Mine were from the most recently completed academic year, while yours were from several years ago. Together, they support the slippage described @4. Washington state’s per-student K-12 expenditures are not in the top ten and rising; they’re in the second ten, and falling.

@22: I know you’re just flippantly making a point, but look again at the statistics I provided. New York State is #1, and the difference between it and #2 isn’t small. Washington spends approximately 2/3 of what New York does.

I live in New York, and my child just finished kindergarten, one of 19 students with a full-time teacher and a full-time assistant in the classroom; full-time art, music, and librarians on site. To spend money well, it must be spent at all, and Washington state simply isn’t doing that, at least not anywhere near the level New York does.

@27: “…but the celebration was limited to that area only,”

That’s how permits work, yes.

“…and I believe there was a six-hour time limit - a ruling loaded with prejudice and loathing.”

What you believe about this matter, and what actually happened, have already been shown to be different things, and, again, any permit will have a time limit. Whatever the time limit was, there’s no evidence “prejudice and loathing” had anything to do with it.

A community which had started celebrating Pride a mere two years ago had their Pride event threatened by bigots, but they fought back, overcame the bigots, and held their Pride event anyway. That sounds like a victory over bigotry, which is what Pride is all about.